Re: Garbage Collection

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 25 May 2011, at 12:47, David Chisnall wrote:

> There were also some limitations with the GNUstep approach - aside from 
> needing programmer effort, which somehow defeats the point of GC.  The lack 
> of weak references meant that some common patterns caused memory leaks.  For 
> example, in the traditional retain/release world, an object registers itself 
> with NSNotificationCenter, which holds an unretained pointer to it, and then 
> unregisters itself in -dealloc, when it is no longer referenced by anything 
> else.  In a garbage collected world, NSNotificationCenter has a reference to 
> the object, so it will never be freed, so can not unregister itself.  The 
> notification center requires a weak reference, so that the object can be 
> freed when nothing else holds a reference to it and the notification centre 
> can then clean up.

Er ... the GNUstep implementation has always had weak references and didn't 
need more programmer effort ... it just does it a bit differently from the way 
Apple later chose.  GNUstep registers weak references for a class at runtime 
when the class is initialised, while Apple implemented it in the compiler, so 
the difference in programmer effort is basically whether the programmer calls a 
function in +initialize or declares a variable as 'weak' in a header.